A social network service is an online service, platform or site that focuses on building and reflecting of social networks or social relations among people (e.g., those who share interests and/or activities). A social network service essentially consists of a representation of each user (often a profile), his/her social links, and a variety of additional services. Most social network services are web based and provide means for users to interact over the Internet, such as by e-mail and instant messaging. Social networking sites allow users to share ideas, activities, events, and interests within their individual networks.
In a multi-tenant social networking environment, where a tenant is an organization, each tenant needs to keep their data segregated from each other tenant for security and privacy purposes. However, there may be situations when multiple tenants are cooperating with one another, such as in a business-to-business environment, and desire to have their data safely shared with one another.
Currently, in order for organizations to share data amongst each other, a user of one organization (e.g., organization A) may be provided an account with the other organization (e.g., organization B). The user of organization A would then log into the environment or tenant space of organization B to access data and interact with users in organization B. However, requiring the user to log into another environment or tenant space is time consuming and inefficient.
Alternatively, a user in organization B may have to explicitly share the data with the user in organization A, such as by e-mail. The user in organization B would then have to explicitly share the data every time organization B needs to share some data with organization A. Such a process is laborsome, time consuming and inefficient.
Hence, there is not currently a means for allowing users of organizations to easily share data amongst each other in an efficient, user friendly manner.